Exclusive: The Defector's Secrets

by John Barry, National Security Correspondent

Hussein Kamel, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect
from Saddam Husseins inner circle, told CIA and British
intelligence officers and U.N. inspectors in the summer of 1995 that
after the gulf war, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological
weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.

KAMEL WAS SADDAM Husseins son-in-law and had direct knowledge of
what he claimed: for 10 years he had run Iraq's nuclear, chemical,
biological and missile programs.

["Of all the pro-war propaganda of Blair and Bush, and their current
threats giving Saddam Hussein yet another deadline to disarm, what
may be their biggest lie is exposed by this revelation.

Two weeks ago, a transcript of a United Nations debriefing of Iraqi
general Hussein Kamel was obtained by the American magazine,
Newsweek, and by Cambridge University analyst, Glen Rangwala (who
last month revealed that Blair's "intelligence dossier" on Iraq was
lifted, word for word, from an American student's thesis).

General Kamel was the West's "star witness" in its case against
Saddam Hussein. He was no ordinary defector. A son-in-law of the
Iraqi dictator, he had immense power in Iraq; and when he defected,
he took with him crates of secret documents on Iraq's weapons
programme. . . .

In 1995, General Kamel was debriefed by senior officials of the
United Nations inspections team, then known as UNSCOM, and by the
International Atomic Energy Agency. The complete transcript, now
disclosed for the first time, contradicts almost everything Bush and
Blair have said about the threat of Iraqi weapons.

For example, General Kamel says categorically: "I ordered
destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological,
chemical, missile, nuclear - were destroyed." All that remains, he
says, are the blueprints, computer disks and microfiches. . .
."--John Pilger, "The Trickery Used to
Create a Threat," Daily Mirror, March 13, 2003]

["You gotta hand it to America's mass media: When war hangs in the
balance, they sure know how to bury a story.

"After devoting thousands of network hours and oceans of ink to
stories about 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq, major US news
outlets did little but yawn in the days after the latest Newsweek
published an exclusive report on the subject -- a piece headlined
'The Defector's Secrets.'

"It's hard to imagine how any journalist on the war beat could read
the article's lead without doing a double take . . ."--Norman
Solomon, "Iraq
Destroyed Weapons In 1991?," Coastal Post Online, March 3, 2003]

[Colin Powell presented the U.N. with details on mobile germ factories,
which came from a now-discredited source known as 'Curveball.' --Bob Drogin
and Greg Miller, "Iraqi Defector's
Tales Bolstered U.S. Case for War," Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2004]